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maybe if people realized that the average computer user wants to spend time accomplishing tasks with their computer instead of spending time installing an operating system and all the hassles that come with that,then the appeal of windows over linux would become apparenti use both, and each has their strong and weak points,but i would NEVER expect the average joe to handle a linux install,whereas i might possibly give someone an xp disk and say "go for it".and save the comments,because you know if you did try that with linux,you're be getting that "ummm,something went wrong" phone call very quickly.

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it's been established that that guy is a sad little troll,so don't bother giving him anymore attention,ok?

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For Gentoo... <a class="user" href="http://gentoo-install.com&quot;&gt;http://gentoo-install.com&lt;/a&gt;

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I recently installed Ubuntu server on my dinosaur of a dev box. Ancient Proliant 6u dual-proc with bizarre bios, freaky controllers and drivers, weird proprietary hardware mixed with my SATA RAID hack bypassing the SCSI array at boot time, etc. Very fussy machine. Burned the ISO, slapped the CD in the dinosaur, rebooted, answered a few mundane questions (timezone and the like), rest of the install went fine and unattended. That's what I call great strides.But I still use XP on all my desktops and laptops. And when I start replacing them, they'll run Vista. I see no compelling reason to change to a different desktop OS. Arguments about "fight the man" and "evil empire" hold no weight with me. Linux on the desktop, for me, would be a step backward. All the tools I use to be productive (my text editor, photoshop, have "pretty good" equivalents in Linux. OTOH, the open source stuff I particularly like (Gaim, for example) runs great on my XP machines. Pre-emptive reply: The inevitable follow-on comment about "emulation" and "dual boot" also has no weight with me. Why bother? Dual boot is for people who don't have enough computers. Emulation is for hypocrites who bleed linux blood and wear penguin shirts in public but want to play games at crippled framerates in private. I run Linux, Solaris, and BSD on servers. I use XP on the desktop. Each to its strengths.

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@arbulus -- Well, I initially asked my questions politely and was greeted with the kind of smug elitism so abundantly on display in your post. In fact, you are everything that's wrong with the Linux community. As an intermediate computer user that mostly just builds rigs to game and store media content, I have neither the time nor the inclination to configure every aspect of an operating system. Ubuntu gets the hype it does because it's supposed to "just work" like Windows or OSX -- and that snicker you just let out upon reading that Windows "just works" is exactly the reason why Linux will never take over the desktop.Also, I will add that I'm comfortable using a command line. But as I only have one machine, the process of rebooting into Windows, searching the forums, and writing down another supposed command-line fix was excruciating. I'm sure it gets better once the OS actually, you know, boots. But that small taste was sufficient to deflate the Ubuntu hype -- it really is a geek operating system that the average mainstream user has no hope of administrating properly.

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Are you serious. Does XP even natively support dual core proccessors. It's obvious you have no idea what you're talking about. Linux uses my gpu for desktop composition, it natively supports and fully utilizes my dual core CPU, it can look at my 3 gigs of ram and figure out a way to use it to make my PC run faster. XP has shotty dual core support, uses my cpu for the majority of desktop rendering and doesn't have a clue what to do with 2/3 of my ram. How is XP using my PC's maximum potential while Linux isn't? XP uses so little of my PC's potential that I could put up a fullscreen Virtualbox session and you wouldn't even know you were in a VM.

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note to self: Highpoint cards suck.(after you get through the blogspam, the ZDNet writer mentions in an update that it's the Highpoint card at fault for all three problems. can't say i'm surprised. you buy s**t hardware that was never tested with anything besides windows, and you'll inevitably hit a hardware bug that was "corrected" in the windows driver.)

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@gerz1219I'm what's wrong with the Linux community, huh? Smug eliteism? I hope you're joking.I've never been anything but open to the fact that not everyone can use Linux, nor will they. I have never, nor did I in my previous post, express any kind of smugness. I would love to see Linux in more places, but I don't believe that it's going to take over the desktop because most users simply don't need the kind of power that it's capable of. Does my 70 year-old granny need it when all she does is check her email and struggles with that? No. I'm not about vicious proselytizing of Linux. I always do what I can to help others who are interested kindly and patiently. Yes, there are people who aren't nice and aren't patient, but you have that in every community, Windows loyalists, Mac loyalists, etc., and those few usually do make it hard for the rest of us who aren't interested in blind devotion. People have different uses and different needs, and different OSs will suit people differently. It's a shame that you encountered a few that fell into that small category of vicious devotees and that it had a negative effect on your view of the Linux community in general.Moreover, no one forced you or is forcing you now to use Ubuntu or any other Linux distro. From what you describe, it's probably not for you anyway, being that you build systems for gaming. There's not a lot of support for most games in the Linux world. And I don't deride you for that. But you can't expect people to respect your side of this and your preference for not using Linux when you trash what other people are into. That's the point I was trying to make.

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